Stop Getting Ignored: Two Ways to Master Push Campaign Timing With Braze

In marketing, there’s no replacement for great timing. The difference between receiving a push notification right as a new season of your favorite show premieres and getting that same message at 4 am is immeasurable, but too many brands are still finding themselves on the wrong side of that equation. You always want to catch your customers when they’re most likely to engage and take action, but making that happen can be easier said than done.

To improve the timing of your push campaigns, you need to leverage the tools at your disposal. Thankfully, there are two powerful ones that can take your push timing to the next level, if you use them thoughtfully:

1. Notice Customer Behavior And Market Accordingly with Action-Based Delivery

The best sales people pay attention to what customers do and respond accordingly. For example, a great real estate agent might notice when you mention that you love cycling, then make a point of highlighting nearby cycling paths while showing homes. The same principle applies to customer engagement. And one of the best ways to ensure that you’re sending messages that are relevant to the people receiving them is to trigger those messages based on each customer’s unique behavior using action-based delivery.

Here’s how it works: First, you identify a trigger event, and then create an action-based campaign within your customer engagement platform that automatically sends a push notification when that event occurs. That might look like automatically triggering a message when a user adds items to an ecommerce shopping cart but closes your app or website without completing their purchase. Or maybe a streaming service automatically sending a push message to any user who has gone a week without starting a movie or TV episode. The key is to think about each user’s expected behavior and customer lifecycle and then build out triggered campaigns that enrich that experience in connection with their actual in-the-moment behaviors and preferences.

Leveraging this key tool ensures that messages always arrive while they’re still relevant, driving stronger results. In fact, action-based push messaging campaigns see 5.5X higher open rates than push messages using time-based scheduling, showcasing the importance of responsive campaigns.

2. Reach Out When Customers Are Already Engaged with Braze Intelligent Timing

While action-based campaigns are a powerful tool, not every message you send can necessarily be tied to a specific user action. But while marketers have traditionally sent non-responsive campaigns at predetermined times—think 2 pm on Monday for an email newsletter—there’s a better way.

Intelligent Timing, part of the Braze Intelligence Suite of automation features, lets you market in a customized, automated way, rather than treating all customers the same. With Intelligent Timing, campaigns are deployed asynchronously, at the right time that's unique to every individual message recipient, no matter where they are in the world or what time of day they're most likely to engage.

That means the same message might reach one customer at 10 am and another at 2 pm, allowing you to communicate with both of them at the time they’re most likely to want to hear from you. Even better? Braze research has found that push messages that use Intelligent Timing are 2.6X more effective at driving app opens than push messages that do not.

Final Thoughts

Every marketer is a consumer, too—and we all know how frustrating and disruptive it can be to get a push notification at an inopportune, unintuitive time. But with action-based delivery and Braze Intelligent Timing, it’s easy to optimize the timing of your push marketing campaigns, supporting more positive customer experiences and stronger business results at the same time.

But while push is a powerful way to reach your customers, it’s not the be-all, end-all of customer engagements. Learn how you can get more out of your push campaigns by adding in other, supplemental channels by checking out our cross-channel messaging data report.